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2. Correct me if I am wrong, but it is not the majority of bitcoin users that need to except the changes. Rather, a majority of miners. If bitcoin grows to be a commonly used currency, the miners will make up a small fraction of the total users. So when we are talking about the majority, we really mean the majority of a small subset. The problem with this is that the miners may have a different perspective on certain proposed changes. For example, it is reasonable that many of the miners would support fixing the solution reward at some number of bitcoins instead of having it trail off to zero. This would be more profitable for the miners. Logically, the normal users would be against this, but reference point one above. The normal users could be convinced through misinformation that this is a good solution. Those that stand to benefit could argue that the supply of bitcoins needs to increase to help the economy move along, or to make transactions easier, or any other lie they can come up with to convince the majority. This is not unprecedented in history.
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emphasis added by me)
You are wrong.
Every full node peer on the network verifies every block they receive before relaying them and adding them to the blockchain. If 99% of the miners are publishing blocks that have a larger reward than the peers allow, those blocks will be relayed among those miners, but will never make it to the users or the miners that don't accept that rule. They will essentially have created their own cryptocurrency separate from bitcoin (though they may try to call it bitcoin as well).
Now if the majority of users decide to go along as well, then you will have something that can actually be used/exchanged with others, and those who stick with the old software could find themselves with something that nobody else accepts and quickly loses value.
As you can see, it requires the majority of peers, not miners.
